Penguin Cafe Orchestra

The Penguin Café Orchestra created music as interesting as their name. It is quite difficult to classify the band into a specific genre as they convey a vast range of styles from jazz, classical, folk, avant garde, and new age music. The band is great at combining an amalgamation of different sounds and turning it into something elegant and pleasing to the ear. The classically trained guitarist, Simon Jeffes, and the immensely talented cellist, Helen Liebmann, were the masterminds behind Penguin Café Orchestra. They keenly worked together to build layers of interesting sounds with their instruments creating a strong sense of ambience. Jeffes often fingerpicked arpeggios on his classical guitar that were repetitive and similar to the minimalistic style of Philip Glass. Liebmann would create a great depth to the sound by bowing her cello to create a low resonance that greatly helped tie together the sound. The band also incorporated very intriguing ethnic drumming patterns into their music that helped drive the rhythm. The highly intricate and catchy polyphonic sound that Penguin Café Orchestra created can clearly be depicted in other bands that were influenced by their sound such as the Magnetic Fields. The band’s experimental approach to making music garnered much respect from various musicians such as Brian Eno, who released the band’s albums on his record label and Kraftwerk, who asked the band to be the opening act for one of their shows. The Penguin Café Orchestra’s concert is very refined and well put together. The musicians are very professional and are able to stay in perfect time. They also incorporate some experimental theatrics into their performance such as having a ballet dancer dance around in the background.
The Penguin Café Orchestra has become a widely respected band, and their music has been used in various television and film soundtracks. Although the band dissolved after the death of Jeffes, his son Arthur Jeffes formed the band Penguin Café, which manages to reprise the beautiful music of his father’s work.